Saint Fletcher the Obscure

[Jan Klimkowski]

Prouty's JFK: The CIA, Vietnam and the Plot to Assassinate John F Kennedy, p187:

In several earlier chapters, Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace was cited as a novel of crucial importance. It stated that a nation state could not survive without warfare, and this work about a top-level study commissioned in August 1963 described an attitude that had begun to surface right after the inauguration of John F Kennedy.

The members of Kennedy's inner circle were concerned that no serious work had been done to plan for peace in the world, and such discussions were heard in the Pentagon. The commissioning of the study in Report From Iron Mountain on the Possibility and Desirability of Peace illustrates this concern.

The reader will understand that the author, Leonard Lewin, has a perfect right to characterize his work as "a novel". I have spoken with Lewin at length. He is a well-informed man who was well aware of the situation in Washington as pictured in the Lansdale/Stilwell report in 1959 and its progression into the Kennedy era, with its Pentagon offices filled by Phi Beta Kappas and other men of experience and learning. The most important part of both "reports" is the many ways in which they overlap and agree with each other, and, even more important, how they have survived the contrivances of the Cold War and have become thoroughly modern military doctrine.

Chairman Mao predicted all this. Many good strategists in the US miltary also foresaw it, so they designed the parameters of the new type of military doctrine and a new type of constant warfare that would, for the most part, take place in the territory of relatively powerless Third World nations.

Thus, in the process of stamping out "Communist-inspired subversive insurgency" or other bogeymen foes, millions of defenseless little people were murdered, as though some monstrous Malthusian bulldozer had been mindlessly set in motion to depopulate Earth. Classic examples of this was the massive slaughter in Cambodia, the Iran-Iraq war, and subsequently "Desert Storm" and other related hostilities in the Middle East.